How to Teach the OO Spelling Rule

Vowel teams can be a tricky concept for our students. Sometimes multiple vowel teams will all say the same sound, other times, you find a vowel team that can say multiple things.

Today, we are going to dive into the “oo” vowel team.

We use the key phrase “Look at the Moon” to teach this phonogram because “oo” has two sounds. I have noticed that students can typically recognize the “moon” sound, but struggle more with the “look” sound.

How we teach the “oo” vowel team

We always start work through all 5-Core Components of Literacy…

…(Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Vocabulary, Fluency, and Comprehension) from a reading lens and then through a writing lens. Working from the sound level through the word, sentence, and then to the passage level allows students to see how everything they are learning comes together.

As we stated earlier, we rely heavily on keywords and phrases, especially with vowel teams like ‘oo’ that have more than one sound. To help students solidify their knowledge of the sounds, we always have them write out the phonogram/vowel team three times while saying the sounds it can make.

By writing it, hearing themselves say it, and seeing it, you are pulling in a multi-sensory component to your lesson. You can also have your student trace the phonogram on glitter paper (or something else textured - the carpet, a grid, etc.). Click here to read more about how we incorporate multi-sensory instruction into our lessons (and the mistakes we made when we first started!)

Then, we will have students practice decoding at the word level. We will work through single-syllable words with the “look” sound and then the “moon” sounds before advancing to multi-syllable words. This section is a great time to also incorporate vocabulary instruction.

Then, we will advance to reading fluency and reading comprehension. We like to use texts that have the “oo” pattern present but do not recommend fully controlled texts. We have found that students are better able to generalize their reading skills when they are presented with non-controlled texts (this is also a great time to practice metacognition skills and see if students can identify words they don’t know!).

Once we have gone through that whole progression for reading,

…we will then work through the 5-Core Components of Literacy through a writing lens. It is important to target all 5-Core Components of Literacy through both a reading and writing lens as these are reciprocal processes that are both critical for a student’s overall literacy abilities.

If you are looking for activities to supplement your vowel team instruction, or, extra practice for your child, check out our “oo” activities on our Teachers Pay Teachers store.